One Dozen Surprising Ways B2B Marketers Are Using Slideshare

September 10, 2013

When you think of B2B online marketing the first thing that comes to mind is probably LinkedIn. What you may not know is SlideShare is also huge for business. Acquired by LinkedIn last year, SlideShare is the world’s largest professional content sharing community. The site receives about 60 million visitors a month with three billion slide views (source).

As content marketing is becoming a staple, more marketers are using SlideShare to share business documents, videos and presentations. This content can be insanely useful or beautifully inspired with high impact visuals. And, because SlideShare lets anyone share content for free, it has amassed a huge library of over nine million presentations. Sorting through it all is easy with the platform’s social discovery features that enable people to find relevant content and connect with others with similar interests. The platform has grown an impressive enterprise base too. Companies like IBM and others are using it to curate content and deliver original stories to custom branded pages.

How can you benefit? Here are a dozen surprising Slideshare marketing ideas for B2B.

#1 Curate Expert Content From Employees

IBM is using Slideshare to curate content from all of their employees and partners on a branded page. It’s amazing what you can do to customize your Slideshare page. It’s like a microsite that works as a content hub for smart people.

#2 Distribute Your Deck

It doesn’t matter if it’s a big or small conference, webinar, or seminar, people want that PowerPoint to take home and study. SlideShare is perfect for distributing your deck because it won’t eat up your email limits and people can download the presentation or view it online. Social Fresh has an amazing library of conference presentations they make available to the world. Would this stop me from buying a ticket to hear the real thing? No way. And, I appreciate not being upcharged to get them later.

#3 Create Excitement About An Event

NetApp holds an annual event for their employees and partners called Insight. Because much of the subject matter is confidential the conference presentations are kept private. Instead they are using SlideShare in a public facing way to build excitement about the destination (Las Vegas!), provide geeky tips relevant to their tech audience, and leak details about the event.

#4 Infographics

#5 Capture Leads

Hubspot is an expert at generating inbound leads through exceptional content marketing. Their SlideShare marketing has been the topic of one case study with results of $1 per name (lead) on a $4,620 spend. By signing up for a premium account you can collect leads from those downloading your SlideShare presentations, too.

#6 Repurpose A Blog

Content creation is a lot of work. The secret is to repurpose stuff into multiple formats. Turn your most popular blog into a presentation.

#7 Replace Blogging

Creating content in an ongoing cycle is super important to a social marketing program. It requires two basic things: 1.) A place to house it, 2.) An audience. SlideShare offers both without all the work and cost that goes into building a new website. Plus, slide shows are fun and easy to create. If you have a blog, embed your SlideShare presentation right into a post and write a few sentence introduction.

#8 Embed Presentations In A Tweet

Did you know that a SlideShare presentation can play inside a tweet? By simply linking to a SlideShare presentation Twitter will embed the presentation into the post which can be played to Twitter.com viewers. Here’s an example of one we did recently.

#9 How-To eBooks

How-to’s like the one above are a great way to show your thinking. Even more, people appreciate learning something new and feel a relationship build with a brand that provides this. In social marketing you have to give, give, give, give, in order to reap the rewards. eBooks, white papers or guides will build brand love and thought leadership ultimately turning into referrals and leads. How would you like to know how-to create an amazing SlideShare presentation? Get your warm fuzzies here with: How To Create Presentation Slides That Are Out Of This World by @slidecomet.

#10 Stats With Visual Storytelling

Not surprising, stats are popular with the B2B crowd. Pair data with a visual and present it in a story and you’ve got something valuable to share. With big data and analytics being such a hot topic people are eager to get their hands on graphs and charts that support their industry. If you don’t have your own original research it’s easy to find good stats on the web. Just be sure to credit your source and use a credible one at that. Here’s a fine example of stats with visual storytelling: Rethinking the Mobile Web by Yiibu. Notice they didn’t forget to credit the research or the Flickr photos.

#11 Quotes & Visuals

Love it or hate it, quotes are popular. Whether it’s an inspiring sports quote on Pinterest or a funny Somee card making it’s way around Facebook, you know if you can capture the mindset of your audience in a visual it WILL be shared. Quotes are popular with business people too. Hubspot’s Ten Nuggets of Wisdom From Steve Jobs today has 79,680 SlideShare views, 276 likes and 1,552 downloads.

#12 Optimize For Organic Search

SlideShare’s audience comes primarily from three places; organic search, social networks, and other SlideShare content. Essentially a SlideShare presentation is a PDF, PowerPoint or Keynote file. If optimized properly these files uploaded to SlideShare will rank in search engine results. It doesn’t matter if the file is on your website or Slideshare’s when your message is getting in front of an audience.

Have you been thinking about SlideShare marketing? Leave a comment or contact us. I’d be glad to help.

Melonie harnesses the power of social media to innovate brands. Over her 15+ year career she has led strategy at top digital agencies including Fandom Marketing, which she founded in 2011. She has worked with some of the largest household names in retail, wholesale, CPG, B2B and B2C. Melonie launched Brands With Fans in 2007 which has grown into a multi-contributor marketing publication.

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